Sungkyun
Journal of East Asian Studies. Vol. 5, No. 2. 2005.
2005 Academy of East Asian Studies. pp. 183-217
Appraising the Quality of Democracy in South Korea: From the Perspectives
of Ordinary Citizens and their Daily Experiences
by
Doh Chull Shin,
University of Missouri-Columbia &
Chong Min Park,
Korea University

Page 189

In the first wave of EAB survey conducted in
Korea,17 a pair of questions was asked to ascertain ordinary citizens’
views on the overall democratic quality of their current regime. Additionally,
in the Korean survey a pair of questions was asked to determine the extent
to which ordinary citizens perceive that their political system has achieved
each of these five properties of liberal democracy. Appendix B lists these
and some other related questions. Responses to the questions, when considered
together, allow us to assess and to compare the general, as well as liberal,
qualities of democracy in Korea.

The General Quality of Democracy

More
than fifteen years have passed since Korea began formal transitions to
democracy. How much progress has been made in transforming its previously
authoritarian rule into a representative democracy? How well does the
existing regime perform as a representative democracy? These are chosen
as the central questions to be addressed in ascertaining the general
quality of democracy in Korea. Underlying this general notion of democratic
quality is the assumption that “how democratic a country is reflects
the degree to which it approximates perfect democracy”.18

From the EAB
survey conducted in Korea during the month of February 2003, we selected
two separate items focusing on the overall quality of each one’s democratic
performance. The first item revealed where the people perceived their
current regimes stood on allowing every adult citizen to elect national
and local leaders in free and competitive elections. Specifically, the
EAB survey asked respondents to rate this characteristic of their current
regimes on a 10-point scale where a score of 1 means “complete dictatorship”
and a score of 10“ complete democracy.”The scores reported on this scale
were collapsed into four categories: (1) hard authoritarianism (1 and
2); (2) soft authoritarianism (3, 4 and 5); (3) limited democracy (6,
7 and 8); and (4) advanced democracy (9 and 10).

17. This survey was implemented by the Garam
Research during February 2003. The pollster selected a national sample
of 1,500 Korean voters and its trained interviewers conducted face-to-face
interviews with all those selected voters. The sample was selected to
represent the population of Korea age 20 and over according to the method
of a stratified probability sampling based on the principle of the probability
proportionate to size. Further technical details can be found in Appendix
A. See also the Garam (2003) and the EAB project website: www.eastasiabarometer.org.